Legal barriers and enablers to upscaling ecological restoration

Abstract

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework both signal the urgent need to upscale restoration efforts worldwide. Facilitative policy and governance frameworks are critical to these efforts. However, the legal barriers to restoration have been historically understudied. This paper assesses the legal issues affecting the implementation of ecological restoration, synthesized across four broad themes: recognizing the role of law in supporting ecological restoration, the incompatibility of some existing laws with the purposes of ecological restoration, the need to clarify terminology, and the legal challenges for restoration at the landscape scale. It concludes by summarizing the key considerations from the literature to inform effective legal frameworks for ecological restoration and identifying areas for further research.